Koeppen (The Hothouse, 2001, etc.), who’s unlike any other writer, produced only five novels in a 60-year career span. But...
An engagingly callow swain pursues the “actress” of his dreams in this previously untranslated 1934 fiction, the first by the great, underrated German author (1902–96).
Banned in Germany in 1936, Koeppen’s tale is an exuberant satire on romantic hyperbole and carnal imbecility, possibly a partial takeoff on Heinrich Mann’s famous novel of obsession, The Blue Angel. Koeppen’s protagonists are Friedrich, a sometime student of literature who works part-time as a tester in a lightbulb factory (lovely irony), and Sibylle, the gorgeous cabaret performer and would-be serious thespian who intoxicates, ensnares, enrages, and delights the tormented—and self-tormenting—Friedrich. He follows her to an unnamed “foreign city” (identified as Zurich in translator Hofmann’s lucid introduction) where she’s performing at a “variety theater,” and endures disillusioning introductions to the several other men with whom Sibylle disports herself: among them a bilious drama critic, a wounded war hero (amusingly named Bosporus), and a charismatic “young Russian who . . . [sings] songs about hunger and revolution.” The story moves from Zurich to Italy, whence Friedrich had invited Sibylle, who sends another woman in her place; and where she eventually does join him, for a frustratingly chaste idyll. Afterward, “Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed.” This potentially hermetic and conventional tale is instead a work of extraordinary freshness: Koeppen’s brisk prose (beautifully translated here) renders operatic emotion with urbane precision (Sibylle’s lovers “craved to lie at the foot of her bed like dogs,” etc.), and he brings real intensity and depth to Friedrich’s slavish deference and Sibylle’s determination to become something more than an object of adoration.
Koeppen (The Hothouse, 2001, etc.), who’s unlike any other writer, produced only five novels in a 60-year career span. But they’re all gems, and A Sad Affair is one of the brightest.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05718-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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